Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Jan 11 2022 05:11pm)
Yes, we've got basically the entire family tree constructed this point except for whatever the immediate step was before human infection. There are loads of candidates for predecessor viruses and it really doesn't matter which one it was.
We can be incredibly confident it was not any kind of game of function experiment gone wrong. There are no signs of that kind of modification in the virus genome. The absolute best you could get is that it was created through serial passage with some other animal but even that is pretty suspect and wouldn't be differentiable from a wild virus
If you've got a big project with dozens and dozens of animals undergoing cereal passage that's kind of hard to keep a secret
No we can't.
We can be confident it wasn't created by genetic splicing using public methods like crispr, but we cannot say it wasn't the result of studies on recombining viruses through exposure experiments to study gain of function, especially those trying to recombine coronaviruses to get that very specific furin cleavage site, which is precisely what the WIV was engaged in. As the top health officials from various countries and agencies said in that email chain with Fauci, the odds of the virus naturally recombining to have that specific set of mutations without any other changes that would neutralize it, was astronomical. Especially when no coronavirus sample in the wild has ever shown any related mutation. Its like if you take a dozen decks of shuffled cards and throw them into the air and they land with 12 x 47 cards face-down and a 12x royal flushes all face-up;
Quote
I really can’t think of a plausible
natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar
to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide
that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function
– that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t
figure out how this gets accomplished in nature
If natural coronaviruses were evolving this trait in the wild, you'd expect to find a spectrum of samples with near-miss mutations, and especially with all kinds of unrelated noise in their DNA from all the mutations inbetween.
If the coronavirus was inheriting this trait from recombining with another virus with that exact furin cleavage site that it was being intentionally exposed to by researchers, it would look just like Covid-19, funny that.